Patrizia Casagranda

1979 born in Stuttgart - lives in Krefeld.

The artist Patrizia Casagranda creates expressive symbioses with elements from collage, painting, stencil technology, street art and typography. Her motifs are mostly set up as thematically homogeneous series of images in which the artist follows a certain subject or a special aspect of materiality. In a time of increasing digitalization, which does not stop at art, Casagranda consciously relies on a tangible materiality in her works. On plywood panels, recycled army tents or truck tarpaulins, she creates relief-like, jagged surfaces made of waves, furrows, mortar and knobs.

Casagranda works with the collage principle as well as with its opposite, the peeling of the décollage: She flames the upper layer of the corrugated cardboard to reveal the corrugated profile. She covers fabric over paper, applies writing in graffiti style. The dot grid, which was applied from a mortar-plaster mixture and later coated with paint, played an important role. These knobs are reminiscent of works by Roy Lichtenstein and Sigmar Polke. However, they stand out three-dimensionally in Casagranda's work. Her compositions have up to 15 layers and have a fascinating effect of depth. Up close, the work appears to be little more than an abstract relief. But if you only step back a few steps, the individual fragments suddenly come together and an expressive portrait of a woman manifests itself out of the sea of dots.

On the one hand, Casagranda likes to work with well-known faces in our media world - models, activists or actresses, as in the painting "White Belief II", which shows the American actress Jennifer Lawrence, an emancipated, strong woman who serves as a role model. But unknown people from Casagranda's immediate personal environment also appear as motifs, as well as young, for us nameless, Indian women of the Kalbelia caste who live from picking up rubbish in the slums of New Delhi. The artist made friends with these girls during one of her annual visits to India and was deeply impressed by their unbroken optimism and zest for life, which gave her the inspiration for the “Belief” series.

Whether it is a public face or an unknown private person - it is the warmth of her universal feminine charisma that Casagranda uses to convey what unites and the shared values of love and peace in the world religions Buddhism, Shinto, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and - in the case of “White Belief II “- to emphasize Christianity. So all pictures in the series consciously have the word “Belief” in the title, only their colors and the texture in detail change. Transferred to the question of faith, every picture carries the humanistic message that personal faith can take on many faces, forms and shades, the language of charity and peace always remains the same.